Friday, July 29, 2011

though i've been dabbling in glitch video for years (as my youtube channel will attest), one format i haven't worked with too much is the animated gif... until recently, that is.

i've been posting these full-size on flickr—here is my flickr set of glitch videos and animations. but there's one big problem with hosting animated gifs on flickr: flickr automatically creates copies of your images in multiple sizes, but its resizing scripts don't preserve animations. (in fact, they're automatically converted to jpg regardless of your original image format. so my resized gifs aren't even gifs anymore!)

as such, the only way to view animated gifs on flickr is to view them at original size. this sort of works for me, but only because i post most of my images using a creative commons license. (original size view is not available on copyrighted photos.)

in short, flickr is a pretty lousy service for hosting animated gifs. yes, you can host the files there and save yourself the server space, but flickr's sharing facilities just aren't set up to support animated gifs. flickr does support video files, but there's no way to make them loop (which is kind of the point of making gifs).

however, i've identified a better service for sharing gifs: google+! google+ allows you to post animated gifs right to your stream, where others can +1 them, reshare them, leave snooty comments, and whatnot. (at least in web browsers; i've heard reports that the mobile g+ apps don't yet support animated gifs.) you do still need to worry about the images being resized, but only if they're wider than 402 pixels. this isn't ideal, but it works well enough, so if you're on google+ and want to see some glitch gifs, go ahead and add me. ¶

Friday, July 15, 2011

shorter abdul hakim shabazz: some woman tried to convince me she was homeless, but i know she was lying because she wouldn't've known who i was if she didn't have a radio, and of course homeless people can't operate radios because they don't have electricity. ¶

Friday, July 08, 2011

i played a couple shows in nashville and louisville a few weeks back. i sold a little merch, went to cool places like the patterson house and eiderdown, bought a bunch of records at great escape, and of course got to hang out with old friends like pimpdaddysupreme, EBNC, dj empirical, trademark G of the evolution control committee, and more. good times.

in addition to premiering two new tracks, i also busted my ass preparing glitch video for the nashville show (which nobody really watched). here's some video filmed by EBNC:

my two new tracks feature a new twist on my post-mashup style: they have more overlapping and layering. i deliberately avoided using much layering on a huge smash, as i was trying to explore other compositional techniques—and in particular, i wanted to demonstrate that you can do a lot more in the "mashup" realm than just laying two tracks on top of another and calling it a day. of course, the problem isn't that layering is bad, but that too many use it lazily. so, after introducing some different musical ideas in the mash smarter EP and exploring them in increasingly complex ways over the course of a huge smash, the time felt right to start playing around with layering again.

first up, i decided to revisit the title track from mash smarter not harder—the original track is strong, but the edits unfold pretty slowly compared to the stuff i'm doing now, and i wanted to play with some of those samples again in a more sophisticated way. the result was the drastically reworked "smartass mix", which is up on soundcloud:

i'm extremely pleased with both of these tracks. i think they're more accessible than some of my other post-mashup work but still live up to the principle of "mashing smarter", and i think you'll agree. ¶